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"I feel like I've been very fortunate in that I've stuck like a burr to the dog-leg of the next generation of nerdism. I've been carried into the XXIth century on Bill Gates' pants-cuff."
- William Gibson
 |
| Scooter | ||
| Biotechnology working to bring you a better solar system - a creepy crawly created to do terraforming work on Jupiter's moon. |
No nanoparticles for Benford; he wants real creepy crawlies, which fit into his picture of a sort of dilapidated moon (of Jupiter) in the middle of being worked on by some ill-paid workers. Given the extreme conditions, no terrestrial life will be able to survive. In the future, it is possible that biotechnology may have the answer in the form of genetically altered Earth life forms.
| Bioengeering had put out a spec report on the long crawly things five months back. Scooters had been designed to soak up ammonia-based compounds and digest them into oxy-available ones. |
| Technovelgy from Against Infinity,
by Gregory Benford. Published by Simon and Schuster in 1983 Additional resources -
|
The scooters also make an interesting contrast with the Aleph, the mysterious object that is trundling along the surface on a mission of it's own.
This novel has a theme similar to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendevous with Rama, which also explores the indifference of alien intelligence to human life and values.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Against Infinity
More Ideas
and Technology by Gregory Benford
Tech news articles related to Against Infinity
Tech news articles related to works by Gregory Benford
Scooter-related
news articles:
- Tumblin' Tumbleweeds Lend Hand In Depleted Uranium Roundup
- Cleaning Up Chernobyl With Beets
- GMO Houseplant Cleans Your Air
- Chinese Fern Helps Remediate Arsenic Soil
- Can We Grow Crops On Mars?
| What'll You Have? Extinct Animals Returned, Or Synthetic Eggshells? |
| Black Fungus Blocks Radiation |
| Lunar Biorepository Proposed For Cryo-Preservation Of Earth Species |
| Let's Make Slaver Sunflowers! Engineering Plants To Reflect Light |
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
